The black and white screen, the handsome cowboy in the smoke, the armored leggings with arrows, the reflection of the smoking train on the calm water, the horse hanging in the air, the necklace on the neck of the young woman... This slow-motion opening is too gorgeous and forced What I repeated several times was the background music: Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A major, Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92 - II. Allegretto, Second Movement: Allegretto (Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92 - II. Allegretto). The first half of the song is often linked to Goethe's early epic poem "The Devil" (but it doesn't seem to be based on "The Devil"). After watching the whole movie, when I heard this song again at the end of the film, I thought, the movie Perhaps it is Goethe's poetry that is quoted.
The whole poem is as follows:
Who gallops in the wind in the middle of the night? It was the father who carried his child; he took the child in his arms, and held him tightly, lest he should freeze.
"My son, why are you hiding your face in fear?"—"Ah, Daddy, didn't you see the Demon Lord? The Demon Lord is wearing a crown and dragging his robes?"—"My son, it's smoke."
—"Lovely Come with me, child! I'll have fun with you; all kinds of flowers are blooming on the shore, and my mother has a lot of clothes of gold thread."
- "Good father, good father, you didn't hear/The demon king softly Promise?"—"Don't ring, my son, you must be quiet, it is the sound of the wind blowing withered leaves."
—"Will you, beautiful baby? My daughter will treat you well; I Daughter dances waltz every night, dancing and singing, shaking you to sleep."
- "Good father, good father, don't you see that the devil's daughter is hiding in the dark?" - "My son, I Son, I've been looking at it for a long time, and those are some old gray willows."
- "I love you, your beauty charms me; if you don't want it, I'll take it." - "Good father, good father , he grabbed me and won't let go!, the devil has already scratched me!" ——The
father was so panicked, his horse galloped fast, he hugged the moaning child tightly, and rushed home with great difficulty, The child has died. (Translated by Qian Chunqi)
The fantasy world that exudes gloomy allure in the eyes of the son and the ordinary nature in the eyes of the father are intertwined. We readers will naturally think that the child is just a fantasy, but the end of the poem is the child's mysterious death, which makes the two characters' respective worlds and The real world of our readers is somewhat confusing, and the meaning of "reality" is somewhat blurred. But what is certain is that the two characters each exist in the world in their own eyes, which is the so-called "subjective world". People who can't see the world from the same perspective can't stand shoulder to shoulder, no matter if they are close to father and son or close at hand. "The Fall" (The Fall) is such a story, and the film has already given the audience a hint about the "perspective" shortly after the beginning of the film: Alexandria holds a group photo of family members in one hand, and a finger points to a figure above, When she closed her left and right eyes in turn, the camera switched to her point of view: her fingers "jumped" between the left and right characters in the photo - it turned out to be just a change in sight, not even what we thought was an objective reality Can be turned upside down.
What makes the movie "Falling" stand out is that with only two main characters, at least four different worlds can be shown: the world narrated by (former) stuntman Roy (built on the basis of Roy's own subjective world) , The world imagined by the little girl Alexandria listening to Roy's story (built on the basis of Alexandria's subjective world), the objective world in the film and the world in the film shot in the film. In order to deceive Alexandria to help himself commit suicide, Roy deliberately made some details noticed by Alexandria's children into his own story together with the keys of their two worlds, so that the little girl could fall in love with this story, which sounded very romantic and beautiful to her. The fairy tales were full of characters she knew and liked, and she had touched an orange and a white cloth soaked in it herself. Roy's despairing and sad world was refracted by her innocent heart as her own world. She saw the nigger Otta Benga is the friendly coachman who makes her lick the ice cubes. The mysterious and powerful Mystic's power comes from teeth like the patient's grandfather, and the beautiful princess has the same face as her favorite nurse Evelyn. She thought the world would have a happy ending as she thought, but Roy's story was not a fairy tale. Roy belongs to two worlds: his own subjective world, and the cinematic world he builds with other filmmakers as an actor. Since the latter is produced, every actor in the film is assembled into a part of the world, an object placed on the screen for the audience to appreciate, and the audience loves every leap and every time they carefully offer. Falls, but these movements can be done by another person. Roy is the stuntman in this shadow. He experienced all the sunshine and rain in the movie story with others, but when the big-name protagonist flew up, he only fell, fell, fell. The protagonist on the screen can be cut off or shot in the leg thousands of times in order to make the audience laugh, but only the broken leg of the stuntman is true. A beautiful girl can fall in love with every famous male lead, but only the cruelty of letting down Roy is true - everything that you can't see on the screen does not exist in the world of movies, but in Roy It's so real in its own world. Therefore, in that world in Roy's story, the protagonist, along with all good and friendly things, inevitably dies. This kind of story can only be told when he has lost his mind and has no intention to blind Alexandria with details that the little girl likes and is familiar with: friends leave one by one, and the world is separated. But at this time, Alexandria has experienced life and death and despair like him, and can already share her perspective with him and enter the world described by Roy. And it was because of her intervention that Roy found a spiritual companion again, with hope and courage to live. At the same time, in the process of blending her own world with Roy's world, 5-year-old Alexandria has also grown up and is no longer the child who stubbornly wants the hero and the princess to kiss.
So this film can be seen as a work about the growth and reinvigoration of two characters, tender and tragic: at the end of the story, after the two protagonists go their separate ways, a group of people set against the background of the Seventh Symphony The scenes of "shadow within shadow" flashed in sequence, and Alexandria was pleasantly surprised to find that every person who fell was Roy's face. Her tone was so excited that we can understand that Roy's legs were healed, and she was doing the old stuntman again. Job, live strong in the shadows.
But since that set of shots was transmitted to us through Alexandria's eyes, there is another possibility: those are the faces in Alexandria's subjective perspective, the same as the faces she puts on each character when she listens to Roy's story, It's just a projection in her world, and we don't know who it is that flashes across those rough black and white images. This second way of understanding is completely sad because of the little girl's cheerful voiceover: I don't know where the gentle Roy has gone, but on the screen, thousands of people who live in the shadows like Roy fall again and again.
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